"When we started online engagement with the OurSay platform we had some concerns that the community wouldn’t embrace it.

What we found through using OurSay was just how easy it is to use and to roll out engagements through the community. We needed to build up our community’s use of the platform over time, running numerous forums, whilst building our experience managing online engagement. As a result our database of community members has steadily grown.

We’ve also found the team at OurSay to be responsive and accessible. They’ve provided us with support that has helped us to feel confident that we can use the platform and get the most out of it.

I would recommend using OurSay as a tool for talking to the community and getting feedback. The platform is user-friendly and versatile. It’s not one dimensional like other feedback tools can be, on OurSay people can see the conversation happening and read what others are saying. It gives people options to participate by posting ideas, commenting, placing votes, which goes beyond writing letters or sending emails.

The platform’s dashboard and reporting makes our engagement feedback easily accessible. Plus with the integrated branding, we know that it feels like people are speaking to us at City of Greater Dandenong, which is important.

Using OurSay has become part of our way of engaging and hearing from our community. We’ve even used OurSay to engage our staff, our internal community, too."

Here at Hepburn we have been really challenged in trying to get more citizens involved in council decision making when we need it. Conversely, a few controversial issues have made some staff and Councillors nervous about involving the public in decision making at all.

Engaging OurSay for our council plan was something of a leap of faith, but we had 10% of our population take part. This was completely unprecedented for any consultation in Hepburn Shire. I can't think of another consultation where we had even 1% of the populace as active contributors.

Many of the issues we were afraid would hijack the process became public debates through the platform. This meant that many of the facts and limitations around unreasonable community wants were worked out among community members and competing groups. In fact by ceding control of the debate into the public sphere, council saved itself the trouble of becoming an object of debate ourselves.

In short, opting to give control of the process over to the people through the OurSay platform was one of the most daring but productive decisions council has made in my time. Almost all of the risk we initially perceived was dampened or totally dissolved by allowing the community to fully debate issues in a truly open forum.